Build More Muscle and Get Ripped in 2021!
18 Tips to GetBigger and Leaner
By Ron Harris
“If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.” –Tony Robbins
If you’re like most bodybuilders, you’re far from satisfied with the body you see in the full-length mirror in your underwear. You’d love to be bigger, leaner, or both. You don’t understand why you’re not, since you feel you’re doing everything right. The harsh reality is, whatever you’re doing either never worked for you, or is no longer producing results. You need to make some changes if you want to see any real difference in your physique. Luckily, MD has some great ideas for things you can change right now to get things moving in the right direction again. What can you change? Read on.
Your Gym
There are a lot of reasons why you might want to change where you train. The most compelling reason for a bodybuilder would be to move to a gym with superior equipment and atmosphere conducive to doing what we do. If you’re working out at a place where the dumbbells only go to 80 and you get disapproving glares if you dare to flex a biceps after a hellish pump has been achieved, it’s time you found a new gym. It may or may not be worth it, depending on how close or far the better gym is to you. I wouldn’t expect anyone except someone with zero job or family responsibilities to spend a couple of hours every day driving to work out. Another factor to consider about a new gym is that you won’t know anyone. And if you keep your headphones on and get in and out of the place, it will stay that way. Why be so antisocial? Any of you who know everyone at your gym understands how much time you waste talking to people when you should either be training or well on your way home. There’s also that psychological advantage of being “the new guy.” You know all eyes will be on you, so you will be far more likely to give 100 percent effort on the gym floor.
Training Frequency
How many times a week do you train? More to the point, when was the last time you tried training either more or less often? Even if it’s not practical to train more frequently on a regular basis, there is a surprising effect when you do ramp up the frequency for two to four weeks and then back it off again. Your body will struggle to adapt, and you will notice new gains. Sooner or later, usually sooner if you’re over 30, you will start to overtrain hitting the weights five to six days a week. That’s when you cut back to three to four for a spell and let the muscles recover and grow. Or, you might be someone who trains too much either out of sheer enthusiasm, or you subscribe to the “more is better” philosophy. It’s likely that you’re chronically overtrained and ignore all the signs. You would benefit from more rest days. Try training every other day for a couple of months. If you can’t bring yourself to that, do two days on, one day off. More rest is often the missing piece of the puzzle when your body has stalled out.
Training Volume
Let’s continue that conversation thread and apply it to your training volume. If you’re a high-volume trainer, try adopting a briefer, higher intensity style for a few months. If you’re one of those guys who hasn’t done more than three to four work sets for a body part since Dorian was Mr. Olympia, double or triple your workload for a while and give larger body parts like back and legs 25-30 work sets, with everything else being treated to 12-16. Once again, it’s all about hitting your muscles and nervous system with something they aren’t already accustomed to.
Rep Range
Now we turn to rep ranges. Very often, I see people who identify as bodybuilders rarely doing more than three to five reps per set. A lot of them train more like powerlifters, hitting maximum weights for a couple of reps and then resting for a few minutes before their next attempt. The muscles are never put under enough time under tension to elicit a growth response. If this is you, and you are trying to get bigger and not simply stronger, bump the reps up. Do sets of 8-10, 10-12, 12-15, even 15-20. For legs, you can go up to 50 or 100! Rest only long enough between sets to catch your breath. If you’ve been training with low reps for a long time, the pumps will be so severe you’ll hardly be able to move. If you’re already a repper and no stranger to the pump, work on your strength for a while with sets of three to six for the upper body and five to eight for the lower (warming up properly, of course). You will build strength that will carry over to the higher-rep work when you return to it.
When You Train
Why do train at the time you do? Is it out of habit, convenience, necessity, or personal preference? I understand that many of you get to the gym when you can get there, and don’t have much leeway. For others, and there are many of you now who work at home with a flexible schedule, you do have the option of switching up the time you train. You may not be training at the ideal time of day or night when you have the most energy and alertness, which means your performance in the gym could be better. If you do have flexibility, try hitting the gym later in the day if you’ve been training early, or vice versa. One benefit to moving your workouts to “off hours” is that the gym is far less crowded. You won’t wait for equipment and doing things like supersets won’t pose a problem. Or maybe you’ve been working out when the place is a ghost town, in which case being around a lot of other people – such as better-built and stronger guys, or hot fit chicks – could be a tremendous boost for your motivation.
Free Weight to Machine Ratio
If you use mostly free weights, first off, good for you, as that’s commendable, but it’s time to put the barbells and dumbbells aside for a time and try out all those nifty machines and cables at your gym. If you’ve been ignoring them all this time, you’re bound to find at least a few you really like and that hit the target muscle just right. Cables get a bum rap a lot of the time, but you will see how effective they can be at working a muscle from unique angles of tension that not even free weights and machines are always able to hit. I realize that far more people use primarily machines and cables. If that’s you, make your way to the free weight area and get to work. They are harder to balance and you don’t get the same ego boost from squatting 225 that you do from leg pressing 1,000 pounds, but your muscles will thrive on the free-weight basics if you’ve never done them, or haven’t done many of them in years.
Calories
Sometimes people get pissed off when I am too blunt or put things in terms that seem far too simple. But here it is. If you’re not gaining muscle and you’re training hard and getting good rest, you’re not eating enough. If you’re not losing fat, you’re eating too many calories for the amount you’re expending. People often assume they are eating enough to gain, or cutting calories back far enough to get lean, but you can’t argue with results or lack thereof. Your nutrition plan is only effective if it’s producing the desired results. Try going higher or lower for a month and watch what happens to your body.
Fats
Many of us have been brainwashed into thinking all fats are bad news. Saturated and trans fats as found in fried foods, doughnuts, cookies, crackers and chips should be minimized in your diet. But there are healthy fats in nuts, salmon, avocado and whole eggs that are not only healthy for you but will also aid you in your quest to gain muscle mass. “Good fats” should be on your menu every day.
Carbohydrates
Carbs are another macro that people tend to treat in extremes, either demonizing them and hardly eating any or going overboard and putting down enough of them every day to sink a sailboat. If you’re one of those guys who has been on very low carbs or even true keto for years, why not try and see what bumping up your intake does for you? Top prep coach George Farah is notorious for drastically increasing the carbohydrate intake on many bodybuilders, who feared doing so would make them gain body fat. All the clients of his I ever spoke to reported being quite surprised when not only did they get leaner, but also found themselves bigger and fuller too. There are also those among us who slam down a lot more carbs than they truly require for their activity level (we’re not running triathlons here, people). If you’re carrying more body fat than you’d like and you’re eating clean, odds are the easiest solution would be to reduce your carbs.
Grip and Spacing
Whatever grip you’ve been using forever, switch it up. On pressing movements for the chest and the shoulders, you’ve probably been taking a standard grip with palms facing away from you. Try a neutral grip with palms facing each other, using dumbbells. If you use a barbell, try going a little closer or further from the middle. Back day is where you can really go nuts with different grips and spacing. If your gym has a variety of attachments for the lat pulldown and seated row cable stations, give them all a try. Use both overhand and underhand grips.
Foot Stance
On leg day, you have a lot of options on where to set your feet, especially on machines with platforms like the leg press or hack squat. You can set your feet higher or lower on the platform as well as closer or further apart. Even with squats, you might be using the same stance today you learned 10 or 15 years ago. If it’s shoulder width, open it up and try a wider stance. If you squat with a wide stance, bring it in to shoulder width, or even closer with a Smith machine. Just be sure you always start out light and see how these different stances feel on your knees and hips. But I can tell you with surety that switching up foot positions on the leg press in particular will help you target areas you’ve hardly worked before.
Shoes
This one applies mainly to what your footwear is on leg day. If you’ve been training legs in any type of shoe with a heel, or “air,” or a thick zigzag sole, you are not doing yourself any favors. What you need is a flat sole, as found in wrestling shoes or the Otomix brand. In more recent years, several companies have come out with flat-soled cross-training shoes aimed at those who train in CrossFit style. The top two types are the Reebok Nano and the Nike Metcon, though NoBull (no relation to MD) is coming on strong now as well. If you’ve never squatted or done leg presses or deadlifts with a flat sole before, you’ll find you have better “grip” with your feet and feel more stable. When it comes to calf training, it will be like a whole new world.
Accessories
Common training accessories include belts, straps, and wrist wraps. If you shun them out of some macho bravado, as in “real men don’t need no damn belts,” you should give them a fair trial to see how they might improve your performance as well as keep you safer. Or, if you’ve been relying on one or more of those accessories for years now, leave them in your gym locker for a while and see what it’s like training without them. I’m not pro or anti belts, straps, or wraps. If you need them and they benefit you, don’t ever give a second thought to utilizing them. And if you suspect you may have become dependent on them to the point where you don’t feel you can do any type of weight training at all without them, it may behoove you to set the crutch aside and learn how it feels to train without them.
Sleep
Do you get enough sleep to recover and grow from your workouts? Sleep requirements vary among individuals, often linked to factors such as age and activity levels. Younger people need more sleep, which is why newborn babies sleep 16-17 hours a day – though unfortunately for their parents, usually not for more than two to four hours at a time. If you have a stressful or physically demanding job, you should be getting at least the gold standard of eight hours of sleep per night if not more. I realize not everyone has that luxury due to job, family and/or academic demands, but I also see plenty of people who stay up late watching TV or playing video games when they should be in bed dreaming. If you know you should be getting more sleep, make it a priority.
Partying
You don’t need to live that monk life and abstain from any and all alcohol or smoke some occasional cannabis if it’s legal in your state. But if it’s something you do on a regular basis, as in getting wasted more than once or at most twice per week, you should really consider cutting back on that. It’s only going to hold you back in the long run. Both alcohol and marijuana suppress testosterone and raise estrogen levels, which is antithetical to achieving our physique goals. And if you’re really partying hard, as in staying out until 3:00 a.m. at bars and clubs, you know you’re missing a lot of quality meals you need. If you party two nights every weekend and miss two meals each time, that’s over 200 meals you’re not nourishing your muscles with every year. And if you’re also missing sleep, do the math. Partying like that means you’re constantly taking two steps forward and one back toward your goals.
Cardio
You probably don’t do more cardio than you should, but there are those among us who are cardio queens. A moderate amount of cardio will keep your heart, lungs and circulatory system healthy as well as burn body fat. Too much cardio will interfere with recovery and growth from weight training, as many studies have shown. Some rely on cardio to counter their inability to avoid the temptation of fast food and junk food, using it to burn those empty calories. Others want to stay very lean year-round. If you haven’t been able to gain any muscle in a long time and you’re logging an hour or more of cardio every day, cut back and see what happens.
Much more common is the bodybuilder who does little or no cardio. I get it. Lifting weights is fun, cardio not so much. There is also the fear that even a few minutes of cardio will kill your gains, which is preposterous. Three or four sessions a week of 20-30 minutes will help your gains far more than it will hurt them. For one thing, you’ll have more “wind” on back and leg days and won’t be forced to end sets because you can’t get enough oxygen in your lungs. It will also boost your appetite, critical for those who have a hard time eating enough. Just put some music on your headphones or earbuds that makes you want to move and get a good sweat going!
The Company You Keep
This is a sensitive subject, but it needs to be addressed. We all tend to adopt the attitudes and behaviors of the people we spend the most time with. If those people are positive, hardworking and ambitious, that’s perfect. On the other hand, if they are constantly complaining, gossiping/talking shit, and are jealous, lazy and unmotivated, you need to be tough and cut them out of your life. In bodybuilding, it’s easy to find people who will discourage you, who will remind you every day that they, and you too, can’t achieve your goals because you don’t have the genetics, you don’t have the right drugs, contests are all politics, and so on. These people are miserable and thrive on negativity, using every excuse to justify their own lack of success. Don’t be part of it. It might be difficult to break away from toxic people if these have been your friends and acquaintances for years, but take it from me, you will be so glad you did.
Attitude
I saved this one for last because it’s by far the most important factor in reaching any goal, be it with your physique, career, or relationships. As Henry Ford put it, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” Attitude literally shapes every action you take or do not take, every day. If you believe you can succeed, you will do the things you need to do to achieve your goals. You will understand that there will be obstacles and setbacks, but you must never give up. Believe that if you keep working toward your goals and change strategies as needed (as we have been talking about all along here), you will get the results you’re after. If you are plagued with doubt or negative self-talk that the odds are rigged against you for whatever reasons, you’re doomed to failure. And it goes without saying that once you give up, you’re absolutely not going to reach your goals. Believe in yourself and your abilities and stay positive!
Ron Harris got his start in the bodybuilding industry during the eight years he worked in Los Angeles as Associate Producer for ESPN’s “American Muscle Magazine” show in the 1990s. Since 1992 he has published nearly 5,000 articles in bodybuilding and fitness magazines, making him the most prolific bodybuilding writer ever. Ron has been training since the age of 14 and competing as a bodybuilder since 1989. He lives with his wife and two children in the Boston area. Facebook Instagram
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